Needful Things

Only he couldn’t show the wonderful card he had bought. If a little thought had made that obvious to him, an eleven-year-old kid who wasn’t even bright enough to keep out of Hugh Priest’s way when he was crossing the street, shouldn’t a smart guy like Mr. Gaunt have seen it, too?

Well, maybe. But maybe not. Grownups didn’t think the same as normal people, and besides, he had the card, didn’t he? And it was in his book, right where it should be, wasn’t it?

The answer to both questions was yes, and so Brian let go of the whole thing an went back to sleep as the rain pelted against his window and the restless fall wind screamed in the angles beneath the eaves.

CHAPTER FOUR

1

The rain had stopped by daylight on Thursday, and by ten-thirty, when Polly looked out the front window of You Sew and Sew and saw Nettle Cobb, the clouds were begi

“How are your hands this morning, Polly?” Rosalie Drake asked.

Polly sighed inwardly. She would have to field the same question, but more insistently put, from Alan that afternoon, she supposed-she had promised to meet him for coffee at Nan’s Luncheonette around three.

You couldn’t fool the people who had known you for a long time. They saw the pallor of your face and the dark crescents below your eyes.

More important, they saw the haunted look in the eyes.

“Much better today, thanks,” she said. This was overstating the truth by more than a little; they were better, but much better?

Huh-uh.

“I thought with the rain and all-”

“It’s unpredictable, what makes them hurt. That’s the pure devil of it. But never mind that, Rosalie, come quick and look out the window. I think we’re about to witness a minor miracle.”

Rosalie joined Polly at the window in time to see the small, scuttling figure with the umbrella clutched tightly in one handpossibly for use as a bludgeon, judging from the way it was now being held-approach the awning of Needful Things.

“Is that Nettle? Is it really?” Rosalie almost gasped.

“It really is.”

“my God, she’s going in!”

But for a moment it seemed that Rosalie’s prediction had queered the deal. Nettle approached the door… then pulled back.

She shifted the umbrella from hand to hand and looked at the faqade of Needful Things as if it were a snake which might bite her.

“Go on, Nettle,” Polly said softly. “Go for it, sweetie!”

“The CLOSED sign must be in the window,” Rosalie said.

“No, he’s got another one that says TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. I saw it when I came in this morning.”

Nettle was approaching the door again. She reached for the knob, then drew back again.

“God, this is killing me,” Rosalie said. “She told me she might come back, and I know how much she likes carnival glass, but I never really thought she’d go through with it.”

“She asked me if it would be all right for her to leave the house on her break so she could come down to what she called ’that new place’ and pick up my cake-box,” Polly murmured.

Rosalie nodded. “That’s our Nettle. She used to ask me for permission to use the john.”

“I got an idea part of her was hoping I’d say no, there was too much to do. But I think part of her wanted me to say yes, too.”

Polly’s eyes never left the fierce, small-scale struggle going on less than forty yards away, a mini-war between Nettle Cobb and Nettle Cobb. If she actually did go in, what a step forward that would be for her!

Polly felt dull, hot pain in her hands, looked down, and saw she had been twisting them together. She forced them down to her sides.

“It’s not the cake-box and it’s not the carnival glass,” Rosalie said. “It’s him.”

Polly glanced at her.

Rosalie laughed and blushed a little. “Oh, I don’t mean Nettle’s got the hots for him, or anything like that, although she did look a little starry-eyed when I caught up with her outside. He was nice to her, Polly. That’s all. Honest and nice.”

“Lots of people are nice to her,” Polly said. “Alan goes out of his way to be kind to her, and she still shies away from him.”

“Our Mr. Gaunt has got a special kind of nice,” Rosalie said simply, and as if to prove this, they saw Nettle grasp the knob and turn it. She opened the door and then only stood there on the sidewalk clutching her umbrella, as if the shallow well of her resolve had been utterly exhausted. Polly felt a sudden certainty that Nettle would now pull the door closed again and hurry away. Her hands, arthritis or no arthritis, closed into loose fists.

Go on, Nettle. Go on in. Take a chance. Rejoin the world.

Then Nettle smiled, obviously in response to someone neither Polly nor Rosalie could see. She lowered the umbrella from its position across her chest… and went inside.

The door closed behind her.

Polly turned to Rosalie, and was touched to see that there were tears in her eyes. The two women looked at each other for a moment, and then embraced, laughing.

“Way to go, Nettle!” Rosalie said.

“Two points for our side!” Polly agreed, and the sun broke free of the clouds inside her head a good two hours before it would finally do so in the sky above Castle Rock.

2

Five minutes later, Nettle Cobb sat in one of the plush, high-backed chairs Gaunt had installed along one wall of his shop. Her umbrella and purse lay on the floor beside her, forgotten. Gaunt sat next to her, his hands holding hers, his sharp eyes locked on her vague ones. A carnival glass lampshade stood beside Polly Chalmers’s cake container on one of the glass display cases. The lampshade was a moderately gorgeous thing, and might have sold for three hundred dollars or better in a Boston antiques shop; Nettle Cobb had, nevertheless, just purchased it for ten dollars and forty cents, all the money she had had in her purse when she entered the shop.

Beautiful or not, it was, for the moment, as forgotten as her umbrella.

“A deed,” she was saying now. She sounded like a woman talking in her sleep. She moved her hands slightly, so as to grip Mr.

Gaunt’s more tightly. He returned her grip, and a little smile of pleasure touched her face.

“Yes, that’s right. It’s really just a small matter. You know Mr.

Keeton, don’t you?”

“Oh yes,” Nettle said. “Ronald and his son, Danforth. I know them both. Which do you mean?”

“The younger,” Mr. Gaunt said, stroking her palms with his long thumbs. The nails were slightly yellow and quite long. “The Head Selectman.”

“They call him Buster behind his back,” Nettle said, and giggled.

It was a harsh sound, a little hysterical, but Leland Gaunt did not seem alarmed. On the contrary; the sound of Nettle’s not-quite-right laughter seemed to please him. “They have ever since he was a little boy.”

“I want you to finish paying for your lampshade by playing a trick on Buster.”

“Trick?” Nettle looked vaguely alarmed.

Gaunt smiled. “Just a harmless prank. And he’ll never know it was you. He’ll think it was someone else.”

“Oh.” Nettle looked past Gaunt at the carnival glass lampshade, and for a moment something sharpened her gaze-greed, perhaps, or just simple longing and Pleasure. “Well…

“It will be all right, Nettle. No one will ever know… and you’ll have the lampshade.”

Nettle spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “My husband used to play tricks on me a lot. It might be fun to play one on someone else.” She looked back at him, and now the thing sharpening her gaze was alarm.